Ebay halt sales of Live 8 tickets

Ebay has stopped allowing its users to auction tickets for the Live 8 concert next month after Bob Geldof, its organiser labelled the site as an "electronic pimp".

Following the end of the ticket lottery on Sunday evening, tickets for the star studded gig started to appear on the site for hundreds of pounds.

Geldof criticized the site and urged people to swamp it with bogus offers of tickets or massively inflated bids.

"What I would ask you to do tonight is to get on eBay and mess up the system," he told Sky News.

"Everyone should go on and pretend they have got tickets for Live 8 ... otherwise go on and bid ridiculous amounts of money for the tickets already on the site," said the feisty Irish rocker.

His appeal did not go unheeded. Within minutes bids which had been running in the hundreds of pounds surged to 10 million pounds.

In a message from the Managing Director of eBay in the UK on the site, Doug McCallum said:

“Dear all,

Today you have made it very clear to us that our previous decision to allow the sale of LIVE 8 tickets on eBay.co.uk was not one that the vast majority of you agreed with. As a result of this clear signal from the Community we have decided to prohibit the resale of LIVE 8 tickets on the site.

Although the resale of tickets is not illegal, we think that this is absolutely the right thing to do. We have listened to the views you expressed on the discussion boards and in the many emails you have sent to us. We shall be working over the next few hours to remove all LIVE 8 ticket listings from the site.